


so let me know when we get there, if we get there

by paperclipbitch



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Angst, F/M, Gen, Han Ships It, Handwaving, Pretentious, Revolution, Run-On Sentences, Sibling Incest, Twincest, i do feel lowkey sheepish about this
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-01
Updated: 2017-01-01
Packaged: 2018-09-13 20:18:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,200
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9140668
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/paperclipbitch/pseuds/paperclipbitch
Summary: Luke’s the one who says “let’s be in love forever”, because he’s the last one left who’s a little naïve, a little bloody-kneed, a little bit thoughtful about what might come next, and after and after and after.“Kid, you won’t even survive long enough for society to judge you,” Han says, cigarettes and coffee, and Leia says nothing.





	

**Author's Note:**

> [Title from _Sort of Revolution_ by Fink.] So, basically, I've never really shipped the Skywalker twins before tbh, but lately I've been making [moodboards for the Star Wars characters as a modern AU](http://poldarkingly.tumblr.com/tagged/star-wars-modern-aesthetics), and this sort of flowed out of that? Tbh I assumed I was making those so I didn't have to write like 150k imagining all the films in our contemporary society, but I guess a pretentious little twincest fic where they make pop culture references doesn't count as actually writing the proper thing. I've been writing this in my phone for a few days, and finally decided to just suck it up and post it.
> 
> Happy 2017! I'm hoping to write and most more this year, I guess we'll see what happens.

When Luke grew up, he was going to be Spider-Man.

Instead, it’s August; Leia wears red boots and scuffs her heels against the sidewalks, pins her braids messily and teaches Luke how to apply eyeliner straight in between lessons on how to shoot straight. Han says things like “I was never a drug runner” and “I’m leaving on Thursday”, and no one really believes him and he’s still here.

Luke’s the one who says “let’s be in love forever”, because he’s the last one left who’s a little naïve, a little bloody-kneed, a little bit thoughtful about what might come next, and after and after and after.

“Kid, you won’t even survive long enough for society to judge you,” Han says, cigarettes and coffee, and Leia says nothing.

Luke is still a boy in a way that Leia was never a girl, and they feel it, in their distances, in the shared and parted childhoods that never match up, not at any points of reference.

Leia does scorn like nobody else, maybe that’s how they bring up kids in politics, and her mouth purses, that argument again: _we can’t, the Rebellion can’t be seen as that place where people reject morality, join us not for what’s right but so you can fuck your siblings_. Her lips quiver, cross and sad in matching measure, and Luke reaches to squeeze her hand. Leia lets him, turns her palm up to his.

Another day, they exchange bandaids and watch the news, the Empire’s mixture of censorship and lies and platitudes. It’s bullshit, but Luke used to watch it like everyone else when he was growing up. 

“How did I even get here,” he wonders aloud, Leia pressing an ice pack to a bruising eye, Han opening a beer bottle with his teeth, a party trick with no cachet here.

“I wonder that every day,” Han agrees, but he’s got less at stake here than the rest of them, and he doesn’t go anywhere either. He sparks his lighter, over and over, aimless.

“I grew up on a farm,” Luke says, not to anyone in particular, “I don’t think I was prepared for anything bigger.”

“Did you fuck the animals?” Han asks, blithe.

“No,” Luke snaps, “what the hell?”

“You were sheltered,” Han muses, like he’s ticking a box in his head.

Leia makes a sound that might be a snigger, doesn’t bother to hide it. She laughs more than she used to, when she was a politician’s daughter trying to run a rebellion with her fingers crossed behind her back and her stare set not to blink. She didn’t like Luke much then; he’s not always sure she particularly likes him now.

“We can’t all grow up cheating at poker and smoking cigars in our diapers,” Luke shoots back. In truth, he knows little about Han’s past because Han never shares it, waving a hand to simple questions and outright lying at the sharp ones. He’s unrepentant in a way that no one is, Han, gloriously stubborn and happy under his banner of Well, It Seemed Like A Good Idea At The Time.

Luke asked him once if he was in love with Leia; Han shrugged and said “a little, but, hell, some days I’m half in love with you, kid.”

Han’s sincerity is so insincere it sort of comes back out the other side again into something else; he exhales his words with his cigarette smoke, and they’re careless and easy, and all of it hides what matters to him. Much more than he’d ever confess to, of course.

“You know he’s in deep with at least three different mafias,” Leia told him, and Luke had guessed: when they first met, Han was shooting himself out of a difficult situation, and he wasn’t shooting to scare, wasn’t shooting to miss. Luke was sort of impressed, sort of terrified.

Han’s take is: fuck it, he’ll die sometime either way.

Another week, another failure, another handful dead, another broadcast of Lord Vader’s implacable mask, while Leia rinses peroxide out of her hair and Han and Lando try to cheat each other at cards.

The Empire has censored and purged most archives, stripped everything back, destroyed even living memory, but there’s bits and pieces that fell in the cracks. Luke looks away from the television, down at the photograph he and Leia avoid custody of, passing it back and forth like it burns, like Russian Roulette. Smoothed flat, all creases, it’s got a woman with dark hair and extravagantly painted eyes, a man with lighter hair and a laugh that if you squint looks like Luke’s. They were in love, once, but they’re gone now, and all that’s left is Luke and Leia, pulling at each other’s strings.

Luke’s sneakers squeak on the bathroom tiles, trailing laces, and Leia doesn’t jump. He counts the bumps of her spine, straining against the skin. The first time he met her, she was tied up, duct tape around her wrists, eyes dark and wild, and he’d never seen anyone more beautiful. She’d snarled “I don’t need you to rescue me”, and he’d believed her. He was a kid in those days, _really_ a kid, scared shitless and handling a gun he didn’t know how to use that had been thrust into his hands.

August heat, Leia wraps her wet bleached hair in a towel, turns around. She says his name, flat, folds her arms, but her eyes are soft. She’s a figurehead and she’s so good at it, at inspiring and fighting and spending day after day being the one everyone looks to. Luke stumbles in her wake, holes in his jeans, scabs on his knuckles, trying and failing and hoping too. The Empire was his whole world, but he believes in Leia’s cause. He believes in Leia too.

It doesn’t take much, Luke slides a finger under the shoulder strap of her bra, Leia falls into his chest, fitting against him too well, too naturally. Perhaps if they’d been children together it would have been different, they’d have been a force against the world, making up their own language like twins do, counting each other’s fingers and dreaming each other’s dreams. But they’re older now, and they were never those children, pulling each other’s hair in the backseat of a car. Even with the truth exposed, they can’t drag apart, magnetised to each other, too much and too late.

The table overturns next door, but neither of them jump. August, and everyone is tetchy, hot. Leia’s mouth tilts to his, dragging him in.

Later, Han will have a hickey and Lando a black eye, and there’ll be six different Queens of Spades scattered across the floor, and Leia will lean her head into the crook of Luke’s shoulder and laugh and laugh and laugh.

Another day, and Luke laces up his boots, fingers clumsy, and Han says: “the trick is never to be sorry, kid”, and Luke says: “I thought the trick was never looking back.”

“That works too,” Han agrees, lighting a cigarette.

Luke’s _back_ contains all kinds of sharp things it shouldn’t, and when Leia looks back it’ll be to her city burning to the ground, taking everything she loved with it, and the Rebellion has to win in the end because they’ve lost so _much_. 

Han can sleep anywhere, amongst the smell of cordite and blood, in rattling vehicles and emergency havens and when they’re waiting to run, people shaky-handed for their lives, mumbling prayers and expletives. He’s maybe something magical, or he had his feelings filed off like a serial number, Luke knows which myth Han would like him to believe.

“Don’t do anything stupid,” Han tells Luke, grinning, all of his shit-eating teeth.

“Take your own damn advice,” Lando suggests, stealing the cigarette, kicking one heel over the other.

Han gives him a significant look and Lando gives him one back and that’s what Luke and Leia don’t have, because they haven’t known each other for years, haven’t learned each other’s shortcuts and injokes. Han and Lando have known each other too long, loved each other too long, and their edges are worn smooth, enough that Lando fucked up but came back and came back and hasn’t fucked up again. 

Leia appears in the doorway, hair pinned tight, red boots laced tighter, her face too calm. She doesn’t look at him, but she doesn’t need to.

“Oh, kid,” Lando murmurs, and for a minute he sounds just like Han.

“Baby’s first romance,” Han replies, and there’s a bite in it, but it’s kinder than Luke thinks it’s supposed to be.

 _Hell of a thing_ , Luke thinks, and then wonders whose thoughts he’s tuned into these days anyway.

Later, it rains, and they’re in a concrete bunker with their grazes and something that might be victory, that tastes like sweat on Leia’s skin, her fingers in his hair, her eyes brighter than any that stare out of a photograph, a past neither of them got to have, a future worse than a pipe dream.

Sometimes, Luke thinks they might just do this, might get away with it all after all.

“Tell your dad about this whole clusterfuck,” Han suggested when he first found them, Leia’s eyes fluttering startled open and her shock transmuting to murder in the curl of a lip, “maybe he’ll have a heart attack and save us all the trouble.”

Leia’s a poster child, and Luke’s existence ruins that, especially like this, their calves tangled, sheets worn and tired under the bruises of his hip. He’ll always be a supportive step behind her, and he’ll never be sorry about it: maybe in that part, Han has a point. He’d like to be heroic in his own right, he thinks, and maybe one of these days he might be, but it turns out that Leia’s the part that matters. 

“Why Spider-Man?” Leia asks, her hair a mess in the half-light, her eyes bright and too tired. “Why not Superman, or Batman?”

Luke laughs, hears the scorn she doesn’t need to verbalise.

“Spider-Man didn’t have his shit together,” he says, “he could save the city and still trudge off to school in the morning and be awful at it. I thought that sounded pretty good.”

Leia’s always royalty, always an icon, even sprawled in one of Luke’s faded old t-shirts, something about Pluto still being a planet, the letters peeling from too many washes. She doesn’t need a secret identity, someone to hide behind; but that option was never there for her anyway. She doesn’t fold, not even faced with Han and his endless packs of loaded cards, certain death and an ace or two up his sleeve.

Leia nails her courage to every last post they offer up to her, and Luke admires her for that, long after the first flush of princess and heroine and Luke’s ideas of shining armour shattered down. Maybe she got all the good parts of both of them; maybe he doesn’t mind.

“You’re opening yourself up for a whole world of shit, kid.” That’s Han again, always Han, as August fades into September, rebellions are a waiting game, people spraypainting slogans like they spraypaint bullets on other days, blood skilling across the _fuck the Empire_ scrawls.

“What’s your advice?” Luke asks, even though Han’s advice is dubious at best, potentially fatal at worst, Lando always rolling his eyes and offering something maybe worse, the two of them and their years of triumphs and failures, trying out bravery for a change.

Han rolls his eyes, drinks his coffee. “Never stop running,” he replies.

“You’re not running now,” Luke points out, because Han says he’s leaving every couple of days, tattoos on his knuckles flashing a tense beat only he understands, but he never does, scuffs back again.

“And I’m sure I’ll regret that.” Han’s tone is dry, and Luke thinks about the messages Han receives that he pretends he doesn’t, the ones that say _he’s looking for you_ , the ones that make Leia’s teeth grit, like the Rebellion’s at stake because Han owes thousands of dollars and a suitcase of cocaine to the kind of people you don’t want to be in hip-deep with, and sinking.

Leia is pragmatic. Not always, but a lot, and it’s good: someone should be. Han says he is, but his judgement is hazy, his laughter coming between bloody teeth, hit me again, hit me again.

“I don’t regret Leia,” Luke says, and the clouds are tinting grey for fall, for the long days ahead. He doesn’t care if he’s a romantic, if the others laugh at him behind his back; it’s enough. “I don’t think I’ll ever regret Leia.”

Han doesn’t say anything for the longest of moments, and somewhere at the end of a hall is Leia, spark fire in her eyes, and she’ll drag the world to rights if it takes them all to do it, all of them and then some. It’s scary, maybe, but a relief too. 

“Well,” Han sighs, and they should go inside, find the others, coordinate, exchange their scars and stories, “no, there is that.”

Luke takes that to mean that he agrees.


End file.
